


upside down (boy you turn me)

by stupidqpid



Series: moon over bourbon street [1]
Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:55:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22940590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stupidqpid/pseuds/stupidqpid
Summary: Mingi has odd working hours and even odder methods to heal his back pains (courtesy of Yunho): he still somehow manages to nearly fall into the apartment below and get a crush on the neighbor.Or: vampires are hiding in plain sight.
Relationships: Jung Wooyoung & Song Mingi, Jung Wooyoung/Song Mingi, hinted yunho/hongjoong
Series: moon over bourbon street [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1659388
Comments: 2
Kudos: 81





	upside down (boy you turn me)

**Author's Note:**

> I have some WIPs i'm actively working on but nooo, this idea just had to pop up out of nowhere and refuse to leave until i typed it down.
> 
> Honestly I didn't know who to pair Mingi with, but turns out WooGi is the ATEEZ pairing with the least # of works so here's my contribution to the tag :)

“Man, my back is killing me.”

Mingi’s shift at the pub just started, but heaving boxes and barrels hasn’t been easy on his back, that he pulled in some stupid way the day before.

“Have you tried doing some exercises?” Yunho, his closest friend and coworker, suggests.

“I can barely move, no way am I going to the gym,” Mingi scoffs.

“What about pilates?”

“Do I look like a stressed out middle-upper class wife to you?”

Yunho rolls his eyes as he puts a crate of hard liquor on the counter. “How’s your posture when you sit or sleep?”

“Dunno, never paid attention to that,” Mingi shrugs. He moves to organize the glasses, less taxing on his aching back.

“Hongjoong got an exercise ball to sit on, it did wonders to him,” Yunho presses on, somehow incensed by his best friend’s carelessness for his own health.

Mingi smirks. “Oh, I bet it did.” Yunho blushes and returns his attention to the last couple of boxes left to take to the counter. The peace and quiet are short-lived, however; in fact, as soon as Yunho is done he resumes spewing suggestions he's getting increasingly frustrated to see dismissed. Suddenly, a stroke of genius. Yunho huddles closer to Mingi to murmur in his ear,

“What about sleeping upside down like our ancestors?”

The rag squeaks to a halt on the glass Mingi was cleaning. He tries to nonchalantly look around to see if anyone heard them; he fails miserably, with his black hair fluttering wildly as he looks left and right like an incompetent secret agent from parody movies.

"Sshhh! Do you want us to get fired, or worse? There aren't that many night jobs available and I like where I live," Mingi hisses, widening his rather small eyes and unconsciously baring his teeth.

Yunho gives him a warning look at his mouth before deadpanning, "We wouldn't have to worry if you were a bit more inconspicuous." He then takes a step back and resumes organizing, picking the previous conversation back up like Mingi didn't just freak out.

“It should’ve gotten better _by now_ ,” Yunho comments pointedly, implying their vampiric healing abilities, “What happened?”

The memory of how he threw his back out when he stood up too quickly after tying his shoes flashes in front of Mingi’s eyes.

“Fuck if I know,” he replies vaguely. His friend sighs.

"Try some stretching. Of course it's gonna hurt at first, but be patient and push through."

  
  


Eventually, Yunho manages to talk Mingi into getting a pull-up frame for home exercises. Nobody will have to know he's using it to hang upside down.

To sleep.

Like a bat.

To put it simply, vampires are hiding in plain sight. Centuries of evolution allowed them to stop having to transfigure into bats for easier escapes or sleeping accommodations, preferring instead to lead as human-like a life as possible and fly under the radar. Mingi hasn’t been a vampire for that long, only around 6 years, so when he got turned he benefited from their improved biology to the point of barely noticing any difference with his former humanity.

Some vampire habits are still lingering, though, like sleeping the days away and being more active at night. At least they can roam the streets when the sun is setting and less harsh on their skin, while they don't dare doing the same when it’s rising, in case something happens and the sunlight hits them while they're in an open area.

That’s why Mingi does his shopping online, and waits until sunset to open the front door to retrieve his packages. Like today, when he received the most secure “ _body tower for your home gym needs!_ ” he could find and splurge on, and settled to set it up before it became too late to make noises in the apartment building.

After fighting with the instructions as if they were written in swedish, struggling with keeping the elements straight for half an hour (each), and risking to gulp down one too many screws, the wretched contraption was finally set and sturdy. Hopefully the box isn’t lying and the structure will really hold his entire body weight and then some: getting a concussion doesn’t sound like the ideal way to wake up.

*°*°*

It has been a little over a week since Mingi started sleeping hanging from the pull-up frame. He hates to admit it, in fact he simply shrugged in response when Yunho asked him how his back was faring, but his best friend was probably right. His back already feels a bit better, the discomfort of the stretching becoming progressively more bearable, and even getting positioned to sleep doesn’t feel like a circus trick anymore. Sure, he misses rolling around in his comfy bed trying to convince himself to get up, but it’s a little sacrifice to get back to it sooner.

After setting a couple or five alarms on his phone, because he’s such a deep sleeper he ignores his own instinct to wake up at sunset, Mingi climbs the structure with his long legs and lets his arms hang loose towards the floor, his body swinging imperceptibly until he stills once in deep sleep. The perks of not having a blood circulation that would make him dizzy in such a position otherwise.

  
  


It probably hasn’t been a couple of hours since Mingi went to sleep when he finds himself on the floor, one bar between his legs and the rest of the frame resembling a game of Mikado. To add insult to injury, some metal elements hit the wall, chipping it to varying depths.

“Ow,” the vampire moans, more out of surprise than real pain. Not a single bruise or reddening appeared on his pale skin, despite ending up tangled in several metal bars. After recollecting his bearings he tries to sit up, only to hiss at the sharp pain all over his back, especially the base of his neck; pissed off, he kicks the bar away, causing the ache in his healing lower back to flare up again.

As he carefully moves to stand up, Mingi is startled to hear rather frantic knocking coming from his front door.

"Coming!" he shouts, wobbling his way across his apartment. Mindful of the sunlight in the hallway outside, he opens the door just a crack to keep most of his body protected, just in case. "Yes?"

"Oh, thank goodness!" comes the relieved exclamation. A shorter guy is shifting from foot to foot, as if fighting the urge to barge in and instead being polite. He's sporting a worried look on his handsome face, with a hint of confusion in front of Mingi's almost invisible body. His hair and skin are damp, and the towel draped around his neck does little to absorb the water that made his grey muscle tee more fitting. Mingi gulps. "I'm Wooyoung and I live right below you. I heard such a ruckus, are you alright?!"

The vampire would blush if he could, touched by his neighbor’s concern.

“I’m Mingi, nice to meet you. And I’m fine, thank you for checking in. I just, uh, fell,” he says. It isn’t even a lie.

Wooyoung’s face and tone betray some skepticism. “Sorry for being pushy but it sounded more than a simple fall. I thought my ceiling was going to collapse on me, not gonna lie.”

The taller scratches the back of his head and chuckles embarrassedly. He’s seriously contemplating showing Wooyoung he wasn’t too far from the truth, somewhat feeling like he owes the neighbor for scaring him and to thank him for the trouble of coming to check on a stranger. It’s also such a ridiculous episode that Mingi would rather share it with someone he’ll sporadically see than tell Yunho, who’ll surely tease him until the day they die–and _boy_ do they have the time. What’s the worst that can happen?

“You’re definitely gonna laugh at me but come see for yourself,” Mingi offers boldly as he reaches for the light switch, still shielding himself with the door under the pretense of letting the other guy in.

Wooyoung hesitates, slightly put off by his inability to see but a sliver of his neighbor’s face due to the pitch black apartment, but is relieved when the lights turn on and Mingi steps from behind the door with a shy smile stretching his full lips. He’s also taller than Wooyoung figured, damn it.

As polite as he tries to be in a stranger’s house, curiosity gets the best of Wooyoung when, on their way to the bedroom where the accident happened, he notices what look like blackout curtains hanging from every window of the small apartment: not that common but not unheard of, either, so he doesn’t dwell on it much. Wooyoung is soon distracted by a pile of metal visible from the bedroom door, which Mingi points at with a sad flourish once inside the room. 

“Oh wow,” Wooyoung exhales. He blinks in shock at the tangle of bars and darker bits, possibly plastic, as well as the indentations left on the wall and scratches on the floor tiles where the thing fell apart. “What...what was it supposed to be?”

“A frame for pull-up exercises.”

The shorter widens his eyes even more, if possible, unable to look away. “What were you doing to make such a mess?! Did you fall asleep while doing your morning exercises?”

Mingi's bashful smile dies on his full lips. That hit too close to home. He quickly snaps out of his worrying to come up with a believable lie, and latches onto Wooyoung's mindless comment like a lifeline.

"Ha...haha...N-no, I was… one moment I was doing chin ups and the next I was on the floor, still holding the bar…" Mingi explains, twisting the truth. If anything, he's thankful for a reminder of human activities during the day (nevermind the fact he's never been a morning person and considers those who wake up extra early to start the day with some gymnastic completely nuts).

“Man, you could’ve died! Who did such a lousy job assembling it?” At Mingi’s silence, Wooyoung looks up at him, an apology on the tip of his tongue along with the instinct to twist the knife in the wound. Speaking of which… “Well, I don’t see bruises, cuts or pierced eyeballs so I count that as a victory. You’re gonna be sore for days, though, that’s for sure. Does your back hurt? Do you need a lift to work?”

If the vampire’s heart still worked it would’ve skipped a beat. What did he do to deserve such a kind neighbor?

“I’m-I’m okay, thanks. I’ll just take a painkiller and call it a day,” Mingi says, absentmindedly scratching an arm, “Besides I work in the evening so I’m not in a hurry. What about you? It’s almost 9AM.”

“Shit! I should’ve already boarded the subway,” Wooyoung exclaims, springing into a powerwalk towards the front door. Mingi precedes him with long strides to open the door for him. “It was nice to meet you, I’m glad you’re fine, and if you need anything you know where to find me. I hope to see you around even if we have different schedules, bye!” the shorter says quickly with a cheeky salute and a blinding smile before speeding off, rubbing his hair with the now damp towel.

“Bye…” Mingi greets back faintly. He closes the door slowly and locks it.

_Thunk._

The vampire knocks his head against the door.

“ _Fuuuuuck_ , I’m screwed.”

Whether he’s referring to the landlord who will want his head, to the home gym warranty, or to the hint of a crush for his neighbor, Mingi probably doesn’t know either.

**Author's Note:**

> Might fuck around and write about Mingi's struggles to hide his nature from Wooyoung. I often come up with ideas for sequels or additions to my fics but never manage to type shiet, so we shall see.


End file.
